Thursday, 28 February 2013

The Turkish Prime Minister has not been very diplomatic recently. Image courtesy of the Government of Chile.

Joel Kontinen

Speaking on a UN forum in Vienna, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Zionism was a “crime against humanity.” This happened just after Jews celebrated the feast of Purim in memory of Esther and Mordecai who during captivity in Persia saved the nation from total annihilation.

It sounds like Mr. Erdoğan is competing with Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in who can say the most outrageous things about Israel.

Tuesday, 26 February 2013

”The cradle of humanity” looks like this from outer space. Image courtesy of NASA.

Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists believe that human ancestors came down from the rainforest trees when savannahs began to encroach on their habitat roughly 4 - 6 million years ago.

However, new research published in the journal Geology shows that this is impossible because as early as ”12 million” years ago most of "the cradle of humanity” or the East African Rift Valley and the Ethiopian highlands was grassland.

In other words, it is rather difficult to come down from a rainforest that does not exist.

Sunday, 24 February 2013

Evolutionists believe that Earth resembled a snowball in its early days. Image courtesy of NASA.

Joel Kontinen

Great age is not always an asset, not even for planets or stars. The Earth should actually be void of life if our solar system were 4.6 billion years old.

According to theoretical models, the Sun would have been much fainter and thus given less heat to Earth with the result that average annual temperatures would have fallen below the freezing point.

In other words, life might not have evolved on a snow-covered planet.

The problem is known as the faint young sun paradox. It was popularised by Carl Sagan and George Mullen in 1972. Recently, New Scientist surveyed that current state of the problem and could not produce a credible solution for it.

Source:

Clark, Stuart. 2013. How was Earth's life kindled under a cold sun? New Scientist 2904, 44-47.

Recently, Daniel Robert, a biologist at the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues published a paper in the journal Science on how bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) react to electric fields. The results were amazing.

The bumblebees used the flowers’ electric fields to find out whether other bumblebees had already been to the flower and whether it was worth going to.

It is difficult for an evolutionist to explain how a tiny bumblebee can achieve something that much bigger (and, in their worldview, more evolved) animals are unable to do.

Researchers have often been astonished at the ability of birds. Now, the ability of bumblebees testifies of the intelligence of their Designer.

Thursday, 21 February 2013

The current issue of New Scientist surveys the hunt for missing links.

Joel Kontinen

At least two or three times each year the popular media will make big headlines of the discovery of an ”intermediate fossil” that was previously missing. Much more seldom are we told that old links are still missing because they did not fit in with the Darwinian model of the evolution of life.

Writing in New Scientist, Jeff Hecht surveys the search for missing links. Evolution-believing scientists are trying to find fossils in the rock layers that (according to their model) would fill evolutionary gaps.

In this way, they found Tiktaalik rosea that was touted as the intermediary between sea animals and land animals. However, just four years after its discovery, it lost its place and its prestige.

The same thing happened to Ida (Darwinius masillae) that was supposed to be the grandmother of humans. It turned out that Ida was the grandmother of lemurs.

Evolutionists have tried to transform Archaeopteryx, a magpie-sized extinct bird, into a feathered dinosaur as it was found lower in the rock layer (and is thus presumably older) than the earliest ”feathered dinosaurs”, but the origin of birds is still an unsolvable mystery to evolutionists. The problem will not go away by pretending that dinosaurs are birds.

The search for intermediary fossils has not been able to bolster Darwinism elsewhere than among the true evolutionary believers. The Cambrian Explosion and the ever-increasing numbers of living fossils also weaken the credibility of evolution.

Monday, 18 February 2013

Episode 25 of ICR’s That A Fact video series examines why most people do not believe in evolution.

Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists do not like the statistics that consistently from year to year show that most Americans do not believe in evolution.

Episode 25 of ICR’s That A Fact video series examines this trend that is an embarrassment to evolutionists but is a logical consequence of the evidence that strongly supports the Genesis Creation-Flood Model.

Sunday, 17 February 2013

When a well-known atheist (Michael Shermer) says that science is his saviour or when thousands celebrate the birthday of Charles Darwin, we might suspect that science is more than what we would at first glance suspect.

C.S. Lewis realised that in spite of all the good things modern science has given us, it also has its dark side. In his days, the almost universal use of eugenics, the scientific socialism in the Soviet Union and a racial policy inspired by Social Darwinism were perhaps three of the most glaring examples of the misuse of science.

Lewis saw that science and magic were like twins. They shared three major characteristics: (1) Like magic, science could be a religion. (2) It could cause credulity, so that most people believed everything proclaimed in the name of science. (3) It could be used to control both nature and other people.

C.S. Lewis was very sceptical of scientism, which can be likened to a religion. He was especially sceptical of the power of blind, undirected causes to magically produce all living beings.

The Magician's Twin: C.S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism is a just-released video exploring this aspect of C.S. Lewis’ thinking.

Friday, 15 February 2013

We’ve all heard that our back programs stem from evolution. Darwinians will tell us that as our ancestors walked on four feet, our bodies are not well suited for life on two feet and we thus have back pain.

But did you know that even racehorses can suffer from back pain? As this episode in ICR’s That’s a Fact video series shows, the Fall is a much likelier explanation for back trouble than evolution.

Wednesday, 13 February 2013

Living fossils like the dragonfly are interesting because contrary to what evolution is supposed to be about (i.e change) , many kinds of animals have changed very little (if all) since their early appearance in the fossil record.

Modern dragonflies look very much like dragonflies “150 million years” ago. Once again, the after its kind principle explains living fossils much better than Darwinian storytelling.

Saturday, 9 February 2013

When it comes to the origin of life, Evolutionists have to believe impossible things. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen

George Wald, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1967, was an ardent evolutionist. He was quite outspoken of his reason for rejecting God:

“There are only two possible explanations as to how life arose: Spontaneous generation arising to evolution or a supernatural creative act of God...There is no other possibility. Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others, but that just leaves us with only one other possibility...that life came as a supernatural act of creation by God, but I can’t accept that philosophy because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.”

One might perhaps think that if something is scientifically impossible, it should not be called science – as it isn’t.

Source:

Wald, George. 1972. Frontiers of Modern Biology on Theories of Origin of Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin. The quote is from page 187.

Thursday, 7 February 2013

Mutations are marvellous mistakes, at least according to the Melbourne Museum. Without mutations there would be no evolution and since living things change some mutations have to be beneficial – at least according to the Darwinian story.

The problem for evolutionists is that the scientific literature does not know of a single unambiguously beneficial mutation (the mutation that protects against malaria but causes sickle cell anemia is probably the best candidate.)

Thus, Darwinists have to resort to wishful thinking and storytellling and believe that during the assumed millions of years tens of thousands of mutations were beneficial and promoted evolution.

However, wishful thinking and storytelling have little if anything to do with real science.